Joe Biden’s election victory was greeted with cautious optimism by Chinese state media. However, while the English-language Global Times offered friendly greetings to the United States president-elect, the daily tabloid paper – a stablemate of the Chinese Communist Party’s People’s Daily – said that China must “keep vigilant and stick to the right path of strengthening self-reliance”.
Referring to Biden as “an old friend”, the paper recalled his 2011 visit to a Beijing restaurant while visiting the country as Barack Obama’s vice president. Such “noodle diplomacy”, as it became known, seemed to set a refreshing new tone for China-US relations. His visit to China, including watching a basketball match and visiting suffering people from the earthquake-stricken Sichuan Province, had “left a positive imprint in some people’s memories”, the paper said.
But the warmth that Biden’s visit seemed to engender was not to last through the presidency of…